


every city was a gift

by viverella



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-11
Updated: 2016-06-30
Packaged: 2018-05-03 06:10:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 18,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5279774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/viverella/pseuds/viverella
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>SHIELD’s greatest urban legend is that when Natasha Romanoff later declares, <i>“Agent Barton was sent to kill me; he made a different call”</i>, she means that on that day, he chose to spare her, chose to bring her in instead. But what actually happens is something much stranger and much wilder, something that ends up spanning several years and countless cities and, here and there, a drink or a meal or a quiet smile exchanged on the rooftop of a building in Brooklyn.</p><p>He lets her go. </p><p>This is what follows.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 47.4925° N, 19.0514° E

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tbh blame [Lou](http://romanoffbarton.tumblr.com) for this fic. a while back on tumblr I asked for some au prompts and Lou, who's too full of good ideas and knows exactly how to push my buttons, was all "but what if 'he made a different call' meant he let her go??????" and I literally could not get it out of my head and before I knew it, I'd written a thousand words and, well, here we are. Lou, this one's for you :*
> 
> that wailing sound you hear in the distance is me screaming anxiously about posting this. maybe it's that I haven't posted any clintnat fic in several months or that I haven't posted chaptered fic in literal _years_ but I'm more nervous about posting this fic than I've felt about fic in a long time. especially if you actually like this mess, feedback is super, super appreciated! 
> 
> also you can always find me on [tumblr](http://nataliaromonoff.tumblr.com/)!

Natasha Romanoff was KGB before she was SHIELD, and she has always been her own woman before anything else. She is a woman shaped into a weapon and she is the fire licking at his heels when he turns to run, relentless and angry. But she is also human, still, underneath it all, and she still has a place in her chest where her softness resides, protected by her thorns in the only way she knows how. She is like an island when he meets her, something rough and wild and unforgiving, and she settles into his life like something constant and steady, like a promise, like she’ll always come back, like she hasn’t made a lifelong career of running and running and running.

These are the things that Clint Barton learns in his years chasing and dodging her all across the great wide world. And these are the things that he learns about himself – that it is for her that he thinks he wants to become something reliable, that it is for her that he sees himself as anything close to stable, to a real person. 

Years later, it feels inevitable, like everything they did was leading up to this point. But it’s messy, and they both know it’s messy, and it takes almost a decade and more cities and countries and missed chances than either of them can count, but it’s neat, in a way, in hindsight, because despite everything, things fall into place. Despite everything, they make it. In a way, anyways. 

\---

Snow crunches beneath his boots as he walks across the rooftop to settle down for a long wait. It’s winter in Budapest and the chill bites at him even through the sturdy coat SHIELD dropped him off with, and as he crouches down by the ledge and snaps his bow into place, he wonders what he ever did to Fury to deserve this assignment. He draws an arrow carefully out of his quiver, leaning down against the cold stone of the building. The analysts gave him a three-hour window for the assassination he’s supposed to be stopping, three hours to be crouched up on a freezing rooftop in the middle of winter, snow settling into his hair and against his neck where it manages to slip in under his collar. He wonders if he got stuck with this assignment because he took the last piece of pizza from the breakroom that he suspected Fury had been eyeing. Fury’s spiteful like that sometimes.

The problem with SHIELD, Clint thinks as he grits his teeth against the winter chill, is that everything is need-to-know and even his Level 7 clearance will only get him so far. This is why Clint finds himself in Budapest in the middle of the winter, instead of somewhere warm like Fiji or Hawaii or at least somewhere where he can bury himself under about five blankets and watch feel-good movies all day. It’s all just _here’s your mission_ and _here’s what you need to know_ and _good luck_ and then they drop him off in the middle of Eastern Europe and expect him to do his job. All he knows for this job is that an assassination of a Hungarian dignitary is supposed to go down today and the KGB is sending their best and it’s his job to stop whoever this is. There’s very little intel coming in about this and even less about the assassin Clint’s trying to stop, just that this assassin is a woman and that she’s dangerous to get too close to. The Black Widow, they call her, and she’s as deadly as they come.

Two hours tick by and as he scans the nearby rooftops, he sees nothing but snow and winter and he wants nothing more than to be at home curled up on the couch with a cup of coffee and takeout on the way from his favorite Chinese restaurant. He’s just starting to think that maybe it was a bad tip that led SHIELD to Budapest when a tiny flicker of movement on the building across the street from him catches his eye. A dark figure darts out from a doorway on one of the rooftops and crouches down in the corner, taking cover by the ledge. There’s some incremental movement, like the person’s assembling something, like a rifle. Clint readies his bow and lets out a long, even breath to steady himself. 

A gust of wind kicks at him and he waits for it to subside to loose his arrow, not trusting the unpredictability of winter winds to carry his arrow to where it needs to be. And then the wind tugs off what must be the hood of the assassin’s coat and Clint hesitates. He catches the vaguely annoyed frown on her face as she tugs the hood back up over her head hurriedly, and he wonders why someone who makes a living off of being unseen would choose a hair color so distinctive. For a brief second, she’s a bright spot of red against an otherwise desaturated backdrop, and even from across a wide street, Clint can see that she’s young, younger than him probably and he still turns heads for reaching Level 7 at his age. 

Something about her is unsettling and he can’t quite place what it is. Maybe it’s that she looks so young. Maybe it’s the way her movements are so sure and steady, like she’s done this a thousand times before, like the fear has been trained out of her. Or maybe it’s that the cold doesn’t seem to bother her at all, even though the chill has long since settled into Clint’s bones. 

Clint hesitates, switches out his arrow for something with more bells and whistles, something a little less lethal. He waits for the next still moment and releases it, already reaching for his grappling hook arrow to bridge the distance between the buildings. A cloud of smoke puffs up around the woman, obscuring her view, and he swings across. 

He lands with a soft _thump_ on the roof, careful and light like he’s always been taught, first as a carnie and then as a spy, and yet when he touches down, he’s almost immediately thrown against the ground like this assassin’s been waiting for him instead of whoever she’s been planning to kill. She throws him to the ground and then she’s on him, gun pressed to his throat in seconds, and her eyes are sharp and harsh and close enough to his that he can see the flecks of gold in the green. 

“Who the fuck are you?” she hisses, and her voice is so biting that he can almost feel it cutting into his skin. 

And it’s like she doesn’t even speak to speak, like her words, too, are weapons, like every part of her is designed to kill. Her mouth is twisted into a snarl, and when he throws her off of him, she lands on her feet easily like she’s been doing it her whole life.

( _Maybe she has_ , he thinks. _Maybe this is all she is. Maybe this is what you need to be to be the KGB’s best_.)

She fights like something wild and feral that’s been tamed into pointed fury and she looks about twenty but fights like she’s well into the summer of her career, and Clint is barely able to keep up. She meets him touch for touch even though she’s got to be at least forty pounds lighter than him and five years younger. By every right, he should win this fight, easy as breathing, seasoned agent as he is, but she’s vicious and relentless and she keeps coming at him again and again and again, until finally, he manages to hook her behind the legs and unsteady her, just so, so that he can knock the gun out of her hands and pin her to the roof of the building. And even then, she glares up at him, defiant, daring, like this is a challenge. 

Clint’s free hand twitches by the pistol at his hip, not his weapon of choice but the better for situations like this, and as he looks at her, at the youth still hidden under the hardness in her eyes, he hesitates. There’s a feeling in his gut like when he was nineteen and on his first mission in Bolivia and he could taste it in the air then, too, like the entire world is on the verge of collapsing, like he’s being set up and the sham is all about to fall apart. 

The woman’s mouth twists into something bitter and she all but spits out, “What the hell are you waiting for? You won. Kill me.”

And that doesn’t sit right either, because she’s too sure, too determined, like she’s practiced this too many times trying to make it real. He shifts his weight back, just a touch, lifting just a little off of her, and she flinches like she’s been hit, like this is the threat instead of the gun. Clint frowns, feels something heavy in his chest. He lowers his hand from his holster. Her harsh expression falters and then she scowls again, fiercer this time, almost exaggerated, like she’s trying just a little too hard to seem like she doesn’t feel a thing.

She struggles a little against his weight, but there’s something unsure in her movements, like she doesn’t truly mean it. “What are you doing?” she hisses, and she almost sounds insulted.

“Do you _want_ to die?” Clint asks, and he watches as a wrecked edge overtakes her expression for just a second before it flickers back to angry stoicism.

She stares up at him, tight-lipped and hard-eyed, glaring, silent. And this, too, is a challenge. 

“Do you want to live?” he asks, and he sees something in her expression falter again, something lost and completely adrift, like this is a question she’s never had to consider before. He sighs, feeling his heart drop in his chest as any fight left in him drains out. After a beat, considering, he says, “I’m going to let you up, and when I do, you’ll have a choice. Either you can walk away or you can keep going and then I _will_ kill you. It’s up to you.”

He holds her gaze for a full minute, holds firm and solid so she gets that he means it, so she gets that he gives second but not third or fourth chances, that he means what he says in his line of work. And she keeps a stiff upper lip but he can see something settling into her expression, something he doesn’t quite have a name for but something sure all the same, maybe the first real thing he’s seen from her all day. 

He slowly eases off of her, his motions measured and careful like she’s something untamed and dangerous, and as he backs up, she jerks away, leaping back like she’s been burned. She crouches on the far side of the rooftop, eyes still sharp and wary like she’s waiting for this to be a trap (and maybe that’s it, Clint thinks, maybe that’s the thing about her, that she seems to just wait and wait and wait, like the other shoe is going to drop at any moment). 

“I have a job to do,” she says, still prickly but a little less sharp now, something uncertain in her voice. 

“So do I,” Clint says, and he readies himself for the worst, because he really does have a job and he really can’t let her go through with her assassination, never mind how unsettling she is, never mind that there’s something about her that he doesn’t want to kill. 

There’s a beat and Clint suddenly becomes aware of how quiet the city around them is and he catches himself holding his breath. She’s still and silent, several feet away from him, calculating, waiting. And there’s a second, just a flash, when something in her softens and he catches just a glimpse of someone who actually looks like she’s in her twenties, like all the bluster and defiance aside she does want to live, like she can’t just stare death in the face and not fight her way out. She nods, once, and darts to the edge of the building, flipping herself down, and when Clint rushes to look, she’s a couple floors down, hoisting herself through a window she’s jimmied open. She looks up and catches his eye, and Clint could swear he sees the corner of her mouth flick up, just a touch, but the daylight is bright reflecting off of the snow on the street below and he tells himself later that it was probably all in his head. 

He’s met spies like her before, lifelong assassins and lone warriors. Spies like her don’t smile.

\---

“Uneventful,” Maria Hill reads, deadpan, unimpressed. She looks up from the mission file on her desk and meets Clint’s eyes. “Would you care to elaborate on what that means, Agent Barton?”

Clint shifts his weight. After being picked up from his extraction point in Budapest, he’s barely had a moment’s rest, and everyone he’s seen since then has wanted to know why he was several hours late meeting the extraction team. At this point, he’s run out of excuses for why tailing that Hungarian dignitary was necessary and why it was possible that the assassin might go back on her promise (she didn’t, and when Clint had gathered himself to leave for the day, he’d felt unreasonably relieved, like _he’d_ been waiting for the other shoe to drop too). He clears his throat. 

“The mission was without casualties,” he says, hoping his voice is even, hoping it doesn’t sound like this means more to him than it should. “I succeeded with little to no bloodshed, therefore it was uneventful.”

Maria raises an eyebrow at him. “Uneventful is how I describe filing my tax returns every year, not a failed mission,” she says in her efficient, clipped syllables. She’s not upset, he can tell, but she’s not exactly happy with him either. She’s probably deciding how much paperwork she’s going to unload on him for disobeying direct orders.

“I didn’t fail,” Clint protests, which is probably useless, but Maria at least sometimes considers being his friend so he’s choosing to be hopeful. “I protected that Hungarian guy didn’t I? And by the way, I’m not sure we really should be protecting him. He’s pretty sketchy from what I saw.”

Maria makes a note in the file in front of her but otherwise doesn’t acknowledge his latter comment in the slightest. “Your mission,” she says firmly, “Was to take out the Black Widow. As a field agent, and one of our best at that, we expect you to be able to follow orders.”

Clint squares his shoulders. “You also expect me to make tough judgment calls,” he insists. “This was the right call.”

Maria frowns. “You don’t know that,” she says, sharper now.

“And you don’t know that killing her would’ve solved anything,” he says. “Who’s to say the Russians wouldn’t have sent another assassin?”

Maria pauses, presses her lips together. She leans back in her chair and crosses her arms. She’s silent for a long moment, and Clint, for a wild, fleeting moment, almost thinks she’s going to fire him. Silence is something she wears well, and Clint is fairly sure that one of the reasons she ascended through the ranks so quickly is because her silence has that rare quality of being so carefully ambiguous that it could mean anything. 

“Don’t let it happen again,” she says finally, quietly. She gives him a sharp look. “I don’t want to have to bring this up to Fury.”

Clint nods once, not trusting himself to speak, not trusting the inexplicable urge to protest that this isn’t a promise he can make, because he’s not a spy like they are. He didn’t grow up dreaming of this; this was just his way out of a life he didn’t want. He’s still softer than they are and he thinks that if he said he wouldn’t do the same thing he just did if confronted with that woman again, he’d be lying. 

Maria waves him out of her office, and as he heads down to the personnel floors to gather his things from his locker and head home, he feels something in his chest puncture and deflate, like he’s been holding his breath since he got back. He collapses into his bed that night feeling untethered, like he’s been unhitched from everything real, and he lays in bed staring at the ceiling for hours wondering why it feels like he can’t find solid ground anymore.


	2. 1.3000° N, 103.8000° E

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh my god I am so fucking sorry this update took so long I literally thought I was going to be done at least two or three weeks ago, but then I was just hit with the worst case of writer's block and, well, everything's been pretty difficult since then. I have a good bit of this planned out I'm just having a hard time getting the ideas from my head onto the page. but! here we are, hopefully back on track for more regular updates in the future! at least this is a little bit of a longer update to make up for how long I've taken finishing it!
> 
> as always, comments and kudos are very, very appreciated! thank you, whoever you all are, so so much for sticking around with this mess!

Clint puts it off for as long as he can, because it feels like it’s crossing a line, somehow, even though they have no relationship to speak of, even though no lines have been drawn to cross. But he gets back to work after Budapest and runs down some Bad People in the far corners of the world and that takes a few weeks, and he files all the paperwork that he’s put off for the past month and that takes a few days, and he goes out for drinks with some of the other agents because someone makes a comment that he looks like he hasn’t interacted with another human being in too long and that takes a few hours. 

But eventually, it’s a weekend and he doesn’t have to any work to catch up on (if he took a moment to take stock of himself, he thinks, he might balk at his work ethic in the face of uncertainty) and he’s just sitting on his couch wallowing in his thoughts and he does the inevitable. He looks her up. 

What he finds isn’t much. There’s a heavily redacted SHIELD file that doesn’t tell him much of anything he doesn’t already know and some grainy pictures that look like they were taken at least thirty years ago and a video he doesn’t have clearance to view. The pictures are distorted and out of focus, and the woman in them is in a thick coat with the collar turned up, partially obscuring her face, and her hair hidden under a hat, but the soft angles of her face and the sharpness in the eyes peeking up over the top of her collar hit Clint low in his gut. 

The timestamps place the photos in 1973. The Black Widow looks almost exactly the same as she does now.

\---

Singapore in the summer is hot and sticky and Clint thinks to himself as he readjusts his tie that he can’t remember feeling anything but damp since he got here. At least the swanky hotel that’s hosting this swanky function he’s infiltrating is air conditioned and they’re serving nice, cold champagne by the glass, and although that doesn’t quite offset the annoyance of having to wear this monkey suit in the dead of summer, it’s a start. He’s technically here to intercept an illegal transfer of sensitive data, but he’s had a plan worked out for weeks and he’s been tracking his mark all night and it’s an easy job, when all’s said and done, so he’s choosing to try to enjoy himself for the time being, leaning up against the bar for a drink and watching the endless crowd of people rush past him. 

His mark moves to the far side of the room, and Clint pushes away from the bar to follow, keeping a cautious distance that for anyone else would be carefully calculated but for Clint is based more on gut feel than anything else. Someone brushes by him, making him almost spill his drink, and she’s a flash of golden hair and a light touch at his elbow and a mumbled sorry before she slinks off into the crowd again, dangling off of some wealthy businessman’s arm and throwing her head back in laughter. Clint sometimes wonders how many people at these functions are oblivious to how entrenched the world around them is in corruption – political, criminal, and, tonight, corporate. He wonders how much the quiet, illegal dealings of these businessmen has stayed quiet. He wonders how many here know that the higher-ups in this company have been secretly funneling money into international crime rings to keep their business afloat and force their way past certain pesky permit restrictions. He wonders how many care.

Clint waits until his mark is engrossed in conversation, four drinks in and fuzzy enough not to notice when Clint slips by and bumps into him, lifting the flash drive with sensitive information he means to sell from his pocket and replacing it with a dummy one. Clint disappears off into the crowd with his mark none the wiser, and he contemplates grabbing another drink at the bar before calling it a night since it’s all been smooth sailing and he probably deserves another drink. And anyways, if a corrupt company is footing the bill tonight, he might as well spend as much of their money as he can. 

He orders the hotel’s most expensive scotch and leans back against the bar again, surveying the room and making the most of playing at someone wealthy and lavish, someone who’s accustomed to spending an obscene amount of time and money impressing people who are also wealthy and lavish. He sips at his drink and wonders how it’s possible that people can do this on a regular basis. It could be exciting, he thinks, to get dolled up and waited on every once in a while, but he looks at all the people around him smiling and laughing and thinks about how exhausting that must be, to spend your days trying to win the approval from others also pretending to be people they’re not. 

He lets out a breath and sets his glass down, pushing away from the bar and fishing around in his pockets for his room key. It’s been a good time pretending be a socialite, but he’s finished his job and now that everything’s wrapped up, he can feel the weariness of a long evening’s work settling into his bones. He thinks it’s probably time to call SHIELD to report a job well done and maybe take a hot bath in that huge whirlpool bathtub that comes with the room SHIELD got him for the duration of the job before heading to his extraction point. 

Clint hums softly to himself as he steps off the elevator on his floor and pads down the hall to his room, yanking on his tie a little and thinking that he takes back everything he thought about this being fun because after spending several hours in a suit, he’s stiff and tired and he’d really like to sleep for the next thirteen hours. He makes a mental note to never take a job Maria swears will be a good time ever again. He has no idea what her idea of fun is, but they’ve got wildly different tastes if this job says anything about her. 

He shoves his key card into his room and kicks the door open, pulling his tie off and tossing it aside. He wonders idly what kind of fancy bubble bath soap this hotel has. Maybe they’ll have something lavender scented. 

Just as the door swings shut behind him and he fumbles for a light switch, he feels a prick at his neck, and right before the world blacks out, he thinks _well, shit._ There go his plans for a relaxing evening.

\---

Clint comes to with a start, head spinning and mouth dry, and he lurches forward, his wrists and ankles running up against ties. He blinks blearily and squints at his wrists, at the rope binding him to one of the hotel chairs, pulling a little to test the slack, and sighs in disappointment, slouching as much as his ties will allow. His eyes settle on a figure standing some five or ten feet away from him, obscured by the dim lighting of the room but recognizable nonetheless. Inexplicably, Clint thinks that he’d recognize it anywhere.

The woman steps closer to him, and he sees she has her arms crossed, brandishing a handgun conspicuously. The Black Widow smiles, and it’s like she’s got daggers in her teeth. 

“Good evening, Agent Barton,” she murmurs, and her voice is soft and yet Clint doesn’t feel comforted at all, feels instead a chill drip down his spine. 

He brings a smile to his face, trying for nonchalance even though he knows, somewhere at the back of his head, that the seasoned spy in her probably isn’t fooled. “You know my name,” he says, careful to keep his voice level. 

The corner of her mouth turns up just a touch, and Clint can’t help thinking about how calculated her every movement seems to be. “I do my research,” she says.

Clint matches her smile and catches the way her eyes darken, just a touch. He wonders if he’s better at this than she thought he’d be. 

“Do I get to know your name?” he asks, keeping his tone light to mask the weight in his gut. Even from this distance, he can tell she’s fully armed, spotting another handgun at her hip just like the one in her hand and at least three knives strapped to her thigh, brazenly displayed for full effect, he’s sure. 

The Black Widow doesn’t answer him, just keeps on smiling and steps a bit closer again, exchanging her gun for one of her many knives. Her hair spills over her shoulder as she leans down to meet his eyes and tilts her head, feigning at something sweet and innocent and not filled with poison, and Clint thinks that in any other world, she might be just his type, beautiful and startling and just this side of too sharp. But in this world, he knows that this is all probably an act, that her soft smiles and quiet words have been expertly perfected to push all the right buttons, that regardless of how she acts, she is a killer before anything else.

“You’re blonde now,” he says, and even in the dim lighting the brilliant gold of her hair is stunning. There’s something niggling at the back of his head, and he half remembers a blonde woman at the party, catching her once or twice out of the corner of his eye, always just brushing past him, always with her head turned away. He smirks. “Red turn out to be too much for you?”

She lets out a measured breath and he sees a flicker of something like annoyance cross over her face. “Don’t worry; it’s only temporary,” she says, like she’s toying with him, and pushes her wig off of her head to reveal her red hair, vibrant as ever and pulled back into a slick, businesslike bun. She smiles her catlike smile at him and he thinks that if SHIELD hadn’t spent years training him to be suspicious, he’d probably be well and truly fucked. 

“Now,” she says unhurriedly, like she could take all the time in the world and it wouldn’t matter, and that, Clint thinks, is one hell of a way to interrogate someone. “You have something that I want.”

Clint raises his eyebrows. “Oh?” he says and looks away, hoping for bored instead of uneasy. “You know, you can drop the act. It’s not going to work on me.”

And it’s a gamble, mostly, because he’s only about forty percent sure that she knows how to be anything else and even less that she’ll actually listen, but it’s worth a shot anyways, because she really has read up on him and he knows himself and he knows that fake or not, like this, she’ll wear him down (because he can’t want this, not like the rest of them in their business do, because at the heart of it all, he’s still just some kid from Iowa trying to make his way in the world, and she’s so beautiful and so much and he’s only human, at the end of the day). He sees something in her eyes like she’s weighing the choice carefully, something almost cold and calculating coming over her face before it falls altogether, dropping into something that’s all work and no play, and instead of feeling the knot in his gut ease up, Clint just feels tenser than ever, because somehow this hollowness is worse than the false warmth.

She lets out a long breath and he has about a second or two to brace himself before she rears up again and presses her knife up against his neck, vicious and getting in his space, her mouth curling into a snarl like he saw before, in Budapest, in the winter. And suddenly he’s back on that rooftop, heart in his throat and her sharp eyes boring into his, and he can almost feel the bite of frost-laden air on his skin as she narrows her eyes at him, all the ruthlessness and efficiency he remembers from her motions in Budapest.

“Where’s the flash drive?” she hisses, and he supposes he shouldn’t be surprised to find that it still cuts him down to the bone.

Clint draws the most pleasant smile he can muster at this point and hopes that he doesn’t look as discomfited as he feels. “What do the Russians want with a bunch of boring financial information?” he asks, trying his best at sounding flippant. 

He sees something around her eyes tighten and for a second, there’s something dark in her expression like a switch has been flipped, like even her chilly exterior is all just a façade and there’s something somehow harsher and more dangerous still she’s keeping hidden underneath.

“I don’t think you’re in the position to be asking me questions,” she says after a long, measured moment, pressing her knife a little more firmly against his neck, and he can feel it bite into his skin. “Now tell me where it is.”

There’s a little give in the ties binding one of Clint’s ankles to the chair, and it isn’t much at all, but he’s not one of SHIELD’s best for nothing. He wiggles his leg a little, just so, testing, waiting. He smiles serenely at her. 

“Are you going to kill me if I don’t tell you?” he asks. “Because that doesn’t seem like the most efficient strategy.”

And then she smiles and there it is again, the razor sharpness in her smile, the dark edge, and Clint feels something sink into his gut like ice. When she speaks again, her voice is soft and soothing, somehow cloyingly sweet alongside her razor edges, and it’s the most unsettling thing Clint thinks he’s ever experienced. 

“Killing you is easy,” she says calmly. “Searching a room is easy. You just have to have patience. Patience is a thing I have in spades.”

And it’s just as well that he’s finally gotten an ankle and a wrist loose enough to actually do something, because if it had taken just a moment longer, Clint thinks he might’ve lost his nerve, because there’s something so steely and determined in her eyes like she really could do it, like she’s done it before, like she knows she’ll do it again, and when Clint really thinks about it later, he’s not sure how he thought he could fight her, because he’s never fought anything like her at all, probably never will ever again.

But he manages to wrench an arm and a leg free and then the rest of it is just careful maneuvering as she stumbles back half a step, uncharacteristically caught off guard, unsteady, and when she launches herself at him, he shifts his weight just so to yank himself free of the remaining ties on his ankles and wrists and he’s almost able to get away with it, her knife just catching his bicep to leave a shallow mark. And he’s able to keep up with her in the beginning, which he’ll probably congratulate himself for later because it’s pretty impressive, considering, but then he starts realizing, just a little too late, that he’s about half a second too slow trying to counter what she throws at him, and suddenly, she’s gotten right past every defense he might try to throw up, and he just catches what looks like a gun in her hand before there’s a loud crack and the world blacks out once more. 

\---

When Clint comes to again, he wakes to a pounding head and the taste of blood in his mouth and the busy background noise of SHIELD agents bustling around him. He blinks his eyes blearily a few times to clear the swirling dots from his vision, and when he can actually process his surroundings again, he finds himself still in his hotel room in Singapore, lying on the bed this time as a medic shines a light in his eyes and checks to make sure no lasting damage has been done. They tell him something about a concussion and a couple flesh wounds, but he’s not really listening over the ringing in his ears. 

A team of agents, who must’ve shown up when he missed his extraction, is in the process of combing through his hotel room, no doubt looking for trace evidence that will lead them to the infamous Black Widow, but somewhere in the pit of his stomach, without even looking around too closely, he just knows they won’t find a single thing. Her blonde wig has been collected, her various weapons have disappeared along with her, and even the ropes binding Clint to the chair have vanished. If not for his splitting headache and his trashed room, it could almost be like she was never there. 

Maria Hill stands over him, arms crossed over her chest, frowning down at him. She doesn’t look upset at him, per se, but she doesn’t look particularly happy with him either. Clint blinks blearily at her, feeling sluggish and heavy and completely unequipped to deal with anything real after the night he’s been through. 

“I can explain,” Clint says, for lack of anything better to say. He winces. 

Maria sighs. “I’m sure you can,” she says and gives him a pointed look. “I expect a full incident report on my desk by Monday.”

Clint squeezes his eyes shut, hoping to somehow alleviate the pounding in his head. “Yeah, okay,” he says. He’d fight her on it but he’s exhausted and his mission did go to shit so he figures he’ll whine about it in the morning (and maybe then, he’ll have the time to wonder what one of SHIELD’s top brass decided to show up to a botched field mission).

Maria purses her lips and shifts her weight, looking to survey the room. Across the room, an agent makes a gestures at her, and it makes her frown deepen. 

“Where’s the flash drive, Agent Barton?” she asks, firm as always but, unless Clint’s hearing things, a little more exhausted than she’s ever let on. She’s got just noticeable dark circles under her eyes and Clint wonders what it takes to be her, what it takes to win over the trust and respect of Nick Fury and reach deputy director in your twenties. 

Clint blinks twice, hard. “Uh,” he says, and rubs at the bridge of his nose. He squints down at his feet for a long moment, trying to organize his jumbled thoughts into some sort of order. Later, he’ll blame the blow to the head for how long it takes him to notice that something’s off, but for now, it’s just the slow sinking of his gut as he realizes that his feet feel unrestrained, that he’s staring at his socks instead of those uncomfortable dress shoes SHIELD made him wear, shoes that last time he was conscious he was still wearing. Clint sighs, already imagining the mound of paperwork he’s going to have to go through for this. “Did you check my shoes?”

Maria looks over at one of her agents, who must give her some signal, because she nods once, efficient, sharp. “Empty,” she says. 

Clint groans. “Shit,” he says. “Okay, shit. Sorry, I, uh—Sorry.”

Maria sighs and shifts her weight again. “We have other leads with this group,” she says instead of telling him that everything will be fine, and then her gaze focuses into something sharper and she says, “What I’m more curious about, Barton, is why the Widow let you go. She’s not known for leaving any of her victims alive. Why did she just knock you out? Why you?”

And if Clint hadn’t been trained so well, he might’ve flinched, feeling a little like he’s been hit in the gut, because this is something he’s known, that getting into this business means accepting an early death, that going up against the Black Widow means accepting an even earlier one, but it’s something else altogether having it laid out in front of him so bluntly. He wonders why this feels like a betrayal of some trust he’s never had any right to have in her. 

Clint shrugs, hoping he looks nonchalant. “Maybe she thought she owed me something,” he says. 

Maria narrows her eyes at him, suspicious but not malicious. “Assassins don’t tend to put much stock in debts,” she says. “Especially not ones like her.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” Clint says, sounding maybe a little more petulant than he means. It’s been a long day. “I don’t know any more than you do.”

And it’s the truth, really, because Clint doesn’t know the first thing about the Black Widow and there’s no reason he should know anything about what she’s going to do or why she’ll do it, but as Maria finally dismisses him and sends him off on his way to go home and recover from the night, Clint feels something uneasy under his skin, and as hard as he tries to put the thought out of his mind as he makes the long journey home, he feels like he’s lying. 

(And maybe this, in the end, he’ll think many years later, is his downfall. Maybe he’s always wanted to trust her a little too much.)


	3. 50.4500° N, 30.5233° E

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> welp it looks like I've gotten even impossibly _slower_ at writing oops. I'm just horribly multifandom atm and keep getting distracted by other things (did I tell y'all that I just finished reading [tHE BEST BOOK EVER](http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12000020-aristotle-and-dante-discover-the-secrets-of-the-universe) and you all need to read it) and it's just been the busiest month for me as I'm now visiting some of the grad schools I applied to back in the fall, but every so often, I'll get back to this and sprint through a few hundred words before I get distracted again, so it looks like that's the way this is going to have to be. I hope you're all still sticking with me and like this though! (this chapter is way Dramatic and I apologize this really got away from me) I'm like almost 100% sure this fic will not go abandoned, so I promise new chapters will continue coming out, if slowly at times.
> 
> also let it be known that I'm going to be playing pretty fast and loose with p much all comics/mcu canon, mostly bc I have lots of characters I love (and that I love with Clint) that I want to squeeze into this and also because I think Clint needs his people to bounce off of for the things I have in mind to happen. so enjoy the new babes I've thrown in to mix things up a lil! as always comments/kudos are lovely and appreciated!

Years later, it feels like a lifetime. Years later, it feels like it could’ve been a million times, dodging each other all over the world, just missing the kill-shot, just sidestepping any real consequences. In reality, it’s maybe only five or six times that they go back and forth and back and forth over the course of about a year before it becomes something heavier, something that’s real instead of just a game that they play, chasing each other from country to country. But without his realizing it, without his meaning to, it almost becomes something he looks forward to, despite everything he’s learned as an agent, everything that’s telling him this is a horrible idea.

Clint keeps trying to dig up more on her in his spare time, because she’s clearly done her homework on him and it only seems fair, but it turns out there’s not much more to turn up that he hasn’t already found. Everything he finds has been redacted to the nth degree or otherwise bounces back empty with a _CLASSIFIED_ stamp. Part of him knows that he should give up, that SHIELD isn’t just going to let information about one of their most wanted float around for anyone to find, but part of him still hopes that maybe she’s left breadcrumbs for him to find, that if she’s not going to kill him then maybe she’ll meet him halfway. It’s foolish, in the end, but Clint has never claimed to be particularly smart.

“You know, you could just ask Maria,” a voice comes from over Clint’s shoulder, light and teasing as he stares at a largely blacked out mission report he’s dug up in his search for the Black Widow.

Clint starts, blinking himself out of the glazed-over stupor he’s gotten himself into staring at his computer for too long. His desk is a mess of files he’s supposed to be looking at to prep for a new mission that’s just been handed over to him and paperwork he’s put off from previous missions and empty coffee cups from the Starbucks down the block, and his back aches from sitting so hunched for so long. He rubs at his eyes. 

“Tried,” he says, swiveling around in his desk chair to face Bobbi. “She shot me down.”

Bobbi leans against the desk behind his and laughs, tossing her hair over her shoulder. Bobbi, who Clint would probably call his best friend if he were the type of person to think about having a best friend. Bobbi, who’s his token Reasonable Person, who calls to check up on him when he gets sick to make sure he’s feeding himself, who’s one of the only ones in the office who gets his coffee order right without asking. Bobbi, who Clint asked out on a single date years ago that ended disastrously with Clint throwing up on the side of a road and Bobbi getting a black eye in a bar fight. She’s one of the best agents he knows and probably one of the best people besides and she’s currently smiling at him like there’s some secret that she knows and he doesn’t. 

“You could try Melinda at lunch,” Bobbi says. “She’s been around longer than most. She’s probably run into your assassin a couple of times.”

Clint blinks, drawing a blank as to why Bobbi would be bringing Melinda May up at a time like this. Not that he doesn’t like Melinda – they’ve been coworkers for years and she probably considers him something like a friend on their good days, but he fails to see how she’s relevant at this particular moment. Bobbi rolls her eyes. 

“Did you forget?” she says like she already knows the answer to her question. “We have a lunch date with her since we’re taking over her mission in Kiev. She wanted to talk to us about it.”

“Uh,” Clint says, blinking again to try to clear the fog from his brain. “What day is it?”

“Wednesday,” Bobbi says pointedly and pushes herself off of the desk she’s leaning on. She yanks Clint’s coat off of the back of his chair and holds it out to him. “Come on. We’re already going to be late.”

Clint makes a show of heaving a long sigh but grabs his coat from Bobbi and walks with her out of the bright, shiny SHIELD building and down a couple blocks to the diner that all of them frequent when they want something greasy and unhealthy at the end of a long day. When they arrive, Melinda is about halfway through a huge burger, and even after all these years training under her and working with her, he’s sometimes caught off guard by the sight of her dressed down to her civvies, her customary leather jacket and aviators ditched in favor of a pair of worn in jeans and a loose t-shirt. She nods at them as they arrive and slide into her booth.

“Sorry we’re late,” Bobbi says, already eyeing the menu on the table. “This one forgot about this whole thing.”

Melinda smiles and shoves a fry in her mouth. “I figured,” she says. 

Clint frowns down at the menu trying to decide on a milkshake flavor as Bobbi and Melinda chat and catch up, feeling a little out of sorts after spending the better part of the past two days scouring SHIELD’s database for anything on the Black Widow and turning up empty-handed. Clint is vaguely aware of Bobbi and Melinda gossiping around him, talking about so-and-so who just got transferred to the Madripoor office, about how someone royally fucked up and got demoted two security levels, about someone who’s retiring to desk work from the field next week, but all he can think of is the lines and lines of blacked out text, the information that’s just a layer of ink away. 

After a handful of minutes, Clint suddenly becomes acutely aware of the silence around him, and when he looks up, he finds Bobbi and Melinda looking at him expectantly, and he just blinks owlishly at them. And he’ll later blames all of it on the fact that he hasn’t really interacted with another human being in a couple days, the way he’s too spacey around the eyes, the way nothing really seems to connect. It takes him a moment too long to realize that they’re staring at him because their waitress has arrived to take his and Bobbi’s orders and then a second longer for him to remember to actually order. 

As their waitress walks away, Bobbi snorts and raises an eyebrow at Clint. “A burger and a chocolate milkshake?” she teases. “What are you, like ten?”

Clint glares at her but only half means it. “You’re the worst,” he says. 

Bobbi grins and steals a fry off of Melinda’s plate, and Clint thinks about how he would never dare to do that, thinks about how Bobbi is no older than he is and yet feels like so much more of a true SHIELD veteran than him, thinks about how even with his Level 7 clearance he sometimes feels like an impostor or an outsider, thinks about how he’ll never be as comfortable as people like Bobbi or Melinda are with what exactly they do for a living. 

“Didn’t you have a question for Melinda?” Bobbi prompts Clint as they wait for their food, and Clint feels something tighten anxiously in his chest, because it’s not like he’s ever talked to anyone about this, the way he feels compelled to chase this down like nothing else matters, and he doesn’t know if he wants to admit to it, because there’s something in saying it out loud that has always unsettled Clint. 

And Clint doesn’t know how to say any of that in a way that’ll make sense, so he just slouches a little in his seat and shrugs. Bobbi rolls her eyes. She turns to Melinda and leans her elbows on the tabletop conspiratorially. 

“He’s looking into the Black Widow,” she says like it’s the latest piece of office gossip and not the ordeal that’s been consuming his life for the better part of a year. 

Melinda looks back and forth between Clint and Bobbi like she half expects them to be joking, and when she sees that they’re not, she lets out a low whistle. After a long sip of her coffee, Melinda leans back in her seat and narrows her eyes at Clint. 

“Yeah, I heard rumors you were chasing a ghost story,” she says evenly, but Clint thinks he hears something in her voice, like she thinks he’s crazy, like she doesn’t quiet believe him. 

Clint purses his lips but after a moment, takes her bait. “Ghost story?” he says. “She’s real. I’ve fought her.”

Melinda raises her eyebrows and shoves another fry in her mouth. “So have I,” she says and then frowns like there’s something she doesn’t want to say. “Doesn’t mean that she isn’t a ghost.”

Clint furrows his eyebrows, unable to puzzle through whatever it is that Melinda is trying to tell him, wondering why she feels the need to talk in codes when they’re all supposed to be friends here and friends with the same security clearance at that. Melinda and Bobbi exchange a significant look, and Clint thinks, well, some of them are better friends than others, probably.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Clint asks, and he hopes that Melinda knows that he sounds harsher than he means to, that it’s a byproduct of chasing dead ends for months and chance encounters that never feel like enough with a woman he barely knows but feels like he’s known for a lifetime. 

True to character, Melinda is unfazed, and just shrugs, quietly tracks their waitress approaching them again to set down their food. Melinda smiles warmly as their waitress refills her coffee, kind and friendly and just shy of being a real person, and when their waitress is out of earshot again, the mask falls and the seriousness coloring Melinda’s expression sends a chill down Clint’s spine. She takes a sip of her coffee and leans in across the table, her hands cradling her cup like it’s an anchor keeping her rooted there.

“Look,” she says, her voice hushed and just barely able to be heard over the din of the diner. “All I know is that she was a legend in this business even before I joined, and she was born in Stalingrad when it was still called Stalingrad and she was born as a Romanoff at a time when it was especially inconvenient to be a Romanoff. Say what you will, but that sounds like a ghost story to me.”

Clint blinks and slumps back in his seat, his mind reeling at the new information Melinda has thrown his way. Next to him, Bobbi just shakes her head like she wants to say something but thinks better of it, and sometimes he’s so thankful for her, because she, at least, knows when to prod him and when to let him stew. 

“That’s impossible,” he says, still trying to wrangle all this information into place even as he’s itching to squeeze more out of Melinda. 

Melinda shrugs and runs her finger around the rim of her cup. “Depends on who you talk to,” she says. “There were rumors during the Cold War that the Russians had a supersoldier program comparable to ours, and depending on what you choose to believe, it was a fairly successful one.”

Clint feels something sink in his stomach, as the pieces start to slowly slot into place. It’s an incomplete picture, but however this all shakes out in the end, he just knows all this means that it won’t be pretty.

“What does that mean?” he asks. 

Melinda leans back in her seat and just shrugs again. And for a long moment, she’s silent, just drinks her coffee and finishes off her fries. Clint can just see the gears in her head turning, her perpetually sharp mind carefully weighing the merits of divulging everything she knows as she taps her fingers against the tabletop. Finally, her fingers still, and she sits forward just a little. 

“Next time you’re trying to chase down your ghost,” she says, her voice low and just a touch uncertain like she’s not sure it’s the best idea to tell him this, “Try searching ‘The Red Room.’ You might get something more.” And then after a beat, she adds pointedly, “ _After_ you finish my mission in Kiev.” 

Clint rolls his eyes and waves her comment off, knowing full well that she knows that he has no self control and he’ll look it all up the first chance he gets, but doesn’t prod her for more, because there’s a note of finality in Melinda’s voice, because as much as she’ll indulge him from time to time, the job still comes first to her at times like this. And that’s fine, he thinks, because he’ll have plenty of time after he gets back to the office and before he gets started working on his research for the job that Melinda’s passing off to him and Bobbi because the mission isn’t for another few weeks and he’s got plenty of time. But Bobbi knows Clint too well at this point and knows that if given the chance, he’ll plunge headfirst down the rabbit hole and not come out, so she parks herself by his desk when they get back to the office and she’s there in the morning when he shows up and she’s there the next day and after a while, Clint thinks that it’s probably for the best. It’s been a while since he’s run into the Black Widow anyways, and considering how this has all gone so far, it’s likely that this will just turn out to be another dead end.

\---

It’s a mild spring day in Kiev when the day of the mission arrives. If Clint were the type of person to vacation in cold weather places, he might say that this would be the time to visit Kiev because it’s unseasonably warm and the snow has by and large melted from the ground, leaving just little piles of slush on the sides of the roads. Clint frowns down at the ground below from the cockpit of the Quinjet as Bobbi flies them in close to their destination. They’re here to extract a former Soviet scientist who’s been working out of a largely abandoned complex housed in a now dilapidated castle. Why, Clint wonders, is it that it’s always raiding a castle or something equally unsettling on these Eastern European missions?

As they pull in close to their drop zone, Bobbi motions for one of the other agents to take over for her so she can brief everyone. The plan’s simple, as far as extractions go. Clint gets dropped in first with the perimeter detail to secure the area, then Bobbi follows with the STRIKE team and they close in on their mark to get her out. It’s all cut and dry and something Clint’s done hundreds of times before, but as he takes stock of his arrows and snaps his bows into place, he can’t shake the niggling feeling at the back of his head, the uneasy feeling he woke up unable to shake. 

Bobbi comes over to him as he straps on his parachute for the drop and checks his comms. “Hey,” she says softly, hushed so she won’t draw too much attention. “You okay?”

And sometimes, Clint thinks, he’s so fucking grateful for her, because she sees through all his bullshit even when he’s trying not to make a thing of it, but on a Quinjet with just moments to spare before the drop is perhaps not the best time, so he just gives her a quick smile and says, “Yeah, don’t worry about it. It’s just one of those days, I guess.”

Bobbi nods and steps back to let Clint go, but there’s something in the set of her mouth like she doesn’t quite believe him, like she’ll ask him about it again later once the job is over and they have nothing else on their plates. But for now, she doesn’t push him, knowing better than to try to get into the real stuff right before a mission. 

Clint leaps out of the Quinjet and the silence of the desolate landscape around him fills his ears, nothing but the slight pop of static in his ears from his comms to distract him. He lands softly on the ground and yanks off his parachute as the rest of his team radios in as they each land in their respective places around the perimeter of the complex. The survey of the perimeter is easy, simple, no surprises, because who in their right mind is coming to the deserted outskirts of Kiev to inspect an abandoned castle anyways, but it’s still a relief when he meets up with the rest of his team and radios back to Bobbi’s team that they’re all clear to move in. 

“Alright everyone,” Bobbi’s voice comes crackling through the comms. “It’s showtime. Perimeter detail, hold your positions. STRIKE you’re with me. Clint, bring up the rear and watch our backs. Remember – we’ve got intelligence that the Russians might be after our woman too, so be on your guard. Copy?”

A chorus of affirmations signals that it’s time for Clint to do his job, and he nocks an arrow in his bow just in case as he circles around tail Bobbi’s team into the compound. It’s something he might not do for anyone else on team jobs like this, because he’s a marksman at heart not a hand-to-hand kind of guy and he’ll take the distance option any day if given the choice, but it’s his and Bobbi’s job and Bobbi trusts him more than anyone else on this team and he trusts her and this pattern works for them in a way it might not with anyone else, so he’ll do it, for her. 

They creep through the complex on silent feet, the only sound the wind outside and the occasional drip of melting snow. They got the layout for this place weeks ago when Melinda handed off the mission to them, and everything so far is as it should be – various hallways and large, open rooms that would echo with their footsteps if they hadn’t been so well trained to not make a sound. It’s simple and it’s supposed to be simple but then Clint notices a narrow staircase winding down into the bowels of the compound that wasn’t on any of their schematics and something shifts in his chest, uneasy and wary. 

Bobbi must notice it too, because she says softly, “Clint? Can you clear that area just to be safe?”

And something unsettles Clint about it all, the same mental itch that he gets right before parachuting out of a plane or busting down a door to a sealed complex, but he’s here to do his job so he nods and slinks over anyways. It’s all these dark castles and abandoned places that, entirely irrationally, still manage to get under Clint’s skin. It’s the unknown territory stretching in front of him that’s like being in a ghost story somehow, and while Clint makes a living flying all over the world on covert missions, he’s not entirely fearless. 

The stairway is barely wide enough for him to squeeze down and the damp stone is slippery beneath his feet and when he makes it down to the landing below, it feels somehow more isolated and remote than the rest of this abandoned complex. The damp and the silence sends a chill down Clint’s spine, but the room he walks into is thankfully empty. He does a quick sweep of it and finds nothing but discarded equipment that looks at least a decade old and some rubble. On the other side, though, Clint sees a narrow hallway winding off into the darkness that has the remains of a door hanging off its hinges and he heaves a sigh. 

“Bobbi,” he murmurs through the comms, keeping his voice low on the off chance that anyone unsavory might be nearby. “There’s another room down here that I’m going to check out, but otherwise we’re clear.”

“Copy,” she says. “Rendezvous in five minutes or I’m sending a team to get you.”

“Right,” Clint says, and then turns down the volume on his comms, enough to be able to hear the silence of the space around him while still keeping track of what’s going on with the rest of the team. 

Clint carefully nudges the door aside, wary of squeaky hinges or creaky old wood, and ducks through the doorway into the second room. It’s darker than the first and bigger and more cluttered with more debris – discarded lab equipment, the remains of several old computers, a pile of rubble where it looks like the ceiling has partially collapsed in. Clint wonders how one comes to pick a place like this to set up shop, how places like this get abandoned after so much gets put into setting it up. 

At first glance, there’s nothing amiss except for the usual clutter, but as he creeps in, he sees some freshly disturbed dust in the rubble, like someone picked their way through the room, and he frowns, wondering if their mark found her way here recently. Something sinks in his gut, something chilling like there’s something he’s missing. He takes a deep breath to calm himself. 

A tiny click rings out through the air, loud and echoing in the otherwise silent room, and Clint feels every bone in his body stiffen. He stays very still for a long moment, waiting, testing, and when nothing happens, he raises his hands in a show of good faith, bow and arrow still in hand but no longer threatening, and turns, ever so slowly. His stomach drops when his eyes land on the Black Widow, brandishing a very impressive handgun to his head, and not because he’s being held at gunpoint or even that it’s her, because he realizes in that moment that she’s become such a permanent fixture in his life that he doesn’t even bat an eye when she shows up on his missions these days, but because of the way she looks this time, not self-sure and poised and every bit the trained perfection that he’s all but certain she’s been raised to be. Instead, there’s something about her that looks gaunt and drawn, sunken in her cheeks and around her eyes, and she’s always been pale, light against the striking red of her hair, but she looks even more so now somehow, like she really is a ghost. And she’s always been rough, all harsh eyes and sharp words, but there’s something about her now that looks ragged, like she’s been ripped down the middle and there’s not enough left of her to be a real person anymore. Her eyes stare at him with steely determination, and her usually still and sure hand trembles just noticeably, like she’s been hollowed out and it’s taking everything she has left to hold herself up like she’s supposed to. 

And it should be a good thing, objectively speaking, that she’s clearly so worn through that Clint could actually beat her in a fight, but that part of him is long gone when it comes to her (and sometimes, when he really thinks about it, he thinks it may never have been there), and Clint just ends up feeling sorry and sad instead. He can hardly even think of the mission, that she’s here to get in his way yet again, that she’s here most likely with orders to kill him again; all he can think about is the fact that she looks like death is chasing at her heels. He tries to fight it, the sympathy welling up in his chest, he really does, because it goes against all of his training, everything that SHIELD wants him to fight for, but at some point you see someone often enough that they become a constant in your life and you can’t help wondering, _Are they okay? Who did this to them? Who are they? What are they doing now?_

Clint slowly lowers his hands and refuses to budge like he knows she wants him to, knowing somewhere at the back of his head that he’s probably not in any real danger (or perhaps at least hoping). Her mouth tightens and she shifts her grip on her gun. Her other hand clenches around the handle of a briefcase, something metal and shiny and new unlike the age creeping up on everything else in this compound, and Clint frowns. 

“You know I can’t let you leave here with that,” he says evenly, feeling a little like he’s toeing through a minefield. 

“You know I can’t you leave here,” she shoots back, her voice harsh and cutting, some shaky edge bleeding into it that he’s never heard from her before. 

Clint swallows thickly but tries not to let it show. There’s a wildness in her eyes that makes him uneasy like he hasn’t been around her recently and there’s that gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach telling him to tread carefully. 

“Are you saying you’re actually going to kill me this time?” he says, trying to find that easy tone just this side of too familiar that they’ve fallen into in the past months, encountering each other all over the world, but it comes out sounding forced and strained instead. There’s something different this time and they both know it, only Clint can’t put a finger on exactly what it is. 

Her grip on her gun tightens and she grits out, “I can’t allow you to continue to get in my way.”

Clint jerks back half an inch on instinct alone, raising his hands again in a gesture of good faith. “Hey, hey, woah,” he says, trying to keep the rising panic from slipping into his voice. “Romanoff, come on, you don’t have to do this. You know you don’t.”

And maybe it’s that he calls her by name for the first time ever or that he’s trying to get in the way of what she’s trying to do, but something flashes across her face like anger or anguish, and she suddenly rears up at him and swings the heavy metal briefcase in her hand at him. 

“Shut up!” she shouts at him, and there’s something desperate and frayed in her voice. 

The briefcase hits Clint over the head and knocks him to the ground, his head hitting some of the debris on the floor, and between the ringing in his ears and the force of the fall, Clint’s bow flies out of his hand, just out of reach. He groans as he hits the ground, the stray rubble digging at him even through the layers of his SHIELD issue tac suit, and it’s a long moment before he can sort his thoughts into any sort of sense and react through the pounding in his temples. When he has his wits about him enough to realize that this is very much Not A Drill and that there’s something about the Black Widow today that’s somehow more dangerous than usual even though she’s never been particularly safe, he lurches for his bow. It’s only a couple feet away from him, and with some inefficient scrambling, he manages to just touch his fingertips to its frame, but before he can wrap his hand around it to properly grab it, he feels her foot slam down on his arm and one of her hands grab and twist. 

Clint cries out and the entire world narrows down to just this – the pain splintering up his arm, the sickening crack, the spots swimming in his vision. And he knows then that she would kill him, if given the chance, that whatever happened to her between the last time he saw her and now, someone’s gotten into her head and whatever slivers of warmth he thought he’d seen in her have been firmly tamped out. Clint blinks frantically, trying to clear his vision to get a bearing on the situation, his heart in his throat, and he sees that she’s got her gun out again, her hand shaking as she points it at him, lethal even in the face of her uncertainty. 

Clint scrambles with his unbroken arm to get to his comms, terrified and desperate now, too. “Bobbi!” he shouts, and that’s all he manages to get out before the Black Widow kicks at that arm too. 

“What the hell did you just do?” she demands, her voice high in a mixture of outrage and panic. He’s never heard her like this, so frenzied in her attempt to control the situation, and if he weren’t so focused on not dying, he’d probably worry that more has happened to her than the usual fare that comes with their line of work but for now all he can focus on is the gun pointed firmly at him and the fact that he is very much incapable of defending himself properly against her at the moment. 

“Backup,” Clint gasps, gritting his teeth against the pain spiraling out through his broken arm and his head. “I don’t always work alone, you know.” He bites down on a groan as he tries to cobble together the right sentences to get her to back off. “They’ll be here soon and there’s only one way out of here. No way you can kill me and make it out before they have the place surrounded.”

She furrows her eyebrows at him, her eyes darting back and forth, calculating still if not calm as she usually is, and her expression is dark, darker than Clint has ever seen on her, even in Budapest, and for a horrifying moment, Clint believes down to his core that she’ll shoot him, her finger twitching at the trigger, itching to follow through on the instincts that have been ingrained in her. But just as quickly, she drops her hand and holsters her gun again, bolting away through the only doorway leading to the room, and Clint feels his entire body collapse in a rush of relief, his heart still slamming in his chest. 

Clint isn’t sure how long it takes – it’s probably no more than maybe a minute or so – but the next thing he’s aware of is Bobbi’s face hovering above his, her expression pinched in concern, and her gentle but firm arms helping him up from the floor and hoisting him away from the small, dark room and back towards the light. 

“Jesus fucking Christ, Clint,” she mutters as she hefts him up the stairs back to the ground floor. “What the hell did you get yourself into?”

Clint half-stumbles, half lets himself be carried closer and closer to the Quinjet he knows will be waiting to take them home and the medical team that comes with it, and he tries to make his lazy tongue form the words that he needs to say, suddenly completely drained now that the immediate danger and the accompanying adrenaline rush have passed.

“The mission—she—” he manages to get out. 

“Yeah,” Bobbi says, soft like she’s trying to soothe him. “Yeah, we got her.”

The words are somehow jarring and jangle around in Clint’s chest uncomfortably. “Her?”

“Yeah, our mark,” Bobbi says, “The scientist. We got her. She’s safe.”

Clint blinks heavily. Somehow his actual mission feels faraway and unreal. “No,” he says and then groans as Bobbi’s movements to get him to the extraction point jostle his broken arm. “No, I—the Widow was—a briefcase—she—”

Clint feels just the slightest hitch in Bobbi’s step like she’s taken aback by the information, but to her credit, she just continues plowing forward. “You can tell me about it after we get you medical attention,” she says. 

And as Bobbi maneuvers him back to the Quinjet, Clint thinks, for the first time, that maybe everyone was right about the Black Widow. Maybe he’s not different to her after all. Maybe it’s just been a long game to get him to this point. But then he thinks about the desperation clear in her eyes, the wild need in her every move like she has something to prove, like the stakes somehow have been ramped up. And in the end, Clint winds up back where he always starts with her, uncertain of where he stands. Except this time, he’s not sure he wants to see where the bottom of the well is.


	4. 21.1606° N, 86.8475° W

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> at this rate, I'm probably going to end up saying this almost every time I update but so, so sorry for the delay! I have very few excuses this time and really this is just me being the World's Slowest Writer™ but this chapter does include one of my favorite moments so far and it's nice and long, so I hope that at least is cause for joy! I'm getting a little iffy on pacing for this fic, mostly because I have scenes that I'm dying to write and I keep taking so goddamn long to write everything that I lowkey have a hard time figuring this fic out, but lmk what y'all think!! thank u all for sticking around whoever the few of you are and kudos/comments are super super appreciated!

It’s going to be many weeks after the incident in Kiev before the cast comes off Clint’s arm and he’s back in business again, dragging around his cast and then going to physical therapy and doing desk work in the mean time, and he has plenty of time to procrastinate by poking around SHIELD files and scouring every database he can think of. And it’s probably in bad taste seeing as how the Black Widow just tried to beat him to death and held him at gunpoint, but it’s not like he can do anything useful like go on missions or even spar with Bobbi with his time since his arm’s all busted up, and it itches like no other under his cast, and once he gets up to date on all his paperwork, he needs any distraction he can get. It’s probably a pointless search at this point and the rational part of Clint’s brain is telling him that it’s time to give up this wild goose chase because whatever good will she ever harbored him is clearly long gone for some reason he doesn’t understand, but every time he has a moment of free time, he finds himself revisiting all the old documents he’s dug up in the past and searching with new combinations of all the all the search terms he knows connected to her. It’s like he doesn’t know how to do anything else anymore.

Bobbi catches him once combing through intel from SHIELD back before it was SHIELD, back in the Cold War days, sparse reports about female assassins and camps of little girls out in Soviet territory – the fruits of Melinda’s Red Room tip from weeks ago. She raises an eyebrow at him and slides a cup of coffee across his desk to him. 

“You sure you want to go down that rabbit hole again?” she asks, not entirely unkindly. “You know last time it almost got you killed.”

Clint frowns and minimizes the document he was staring at, taking the coffee and sipping at it. “I’m just looking,” he protests. He waves around his broken arm as if to prove his point. “It’s not like I’m in any shape to be chasing after her anyways.”

Bobbi frowns at him and hums, displeased but at least not actively fighting him. Clint’s computer pings then, indicating a new email, and Clint immediately turns to it, grateful for the excuse to do anything but talk to Bobbi about this. It’s not like he can really explain why he’s doing what he’s doing anyways, just that there’s this feeling just under his skin that won’t let him do otherwise until he gets to the bottom of this. 

Clint clicks through and sees that he’s got an encrypted email from an address he doesn’t recognize. He furrows his eyebrows, wondering how something like this got through SHIELD’s firewall. 

“Clint?” Bobbi says, concern edging its way into her voice, just a touch. 

Clint clears his throat and minimizes that window too. “Yeah?” he says, grinning cheerily at her. 

Bobbi stares at him for a long moment, her sharp eyes quizzical and calculating. Clint sometimes wonders what she sees when she looks at him, because she always seems to know when he’s hiding something. After a moment, she sighs and pushes away from his desk.

“Just be safe, okay?” she says. 

And Clint smiles and nods and knows, somewhere, that she’s right at the end of the day, that whatever it is he’s doing, it’s probably ultimately going to lead to his downfall, but Clint’s never been good at listening to his rational mind, especially when something in his gut is telling him that there’s more to the story than he knows. Clint clicks on the email once Bobbi wanders away and frowns at the message he’s been sent. It’s just a single line of text with no sender information attached to it, not even a sign off, but it reads _Hope your arm feels better_ and Clint feels it in his gut, just knowing there’s no one else it could be. 

He pushes back from his desk and slumps in his seat, heaving out a sigh. After a long moment’s consideration, he deletes the email. 

\---

When the cast comes off Clint’s arm, it feels loose and weak from disuse, and the physical therapy that SHIELD signs him up for helps, but whoever’s in charge of his medical care has the bad habit of assigning him to early morning sessions, so mostly Clint feels a little like he’s dying all over again. Bobbi makes a habit of picking him up an extra coffee on the days she comes into the office – which, these days, isn’t many since she’s been assigned a new mission – but it only helps a little. 

It’s one of those mornings when Clint is coming back from the gym and his arm feels a little like it might fall off from all the exercises his physical therapist had him do and he’s trying to juggle the three days’ worth of mail that he picked up from his mailbox this morning that he tossed into his locker haphazardly upon arrival this morning because he’d been running late for his physical therapy appointment. It’s mostly just ads and a few magazines that he’s somehow subscribed to over the years and always meant to but never got around to cancelling, but wedged amongst them are always a few meaningful things. His most recent paycheck from SHIELD. Some bills. A reminder from his landlord that rent is due soon. 

He sighs and tosses the pile down on his desk. A coffee cup lands on the corner of his desk and slides across towards him, and when he looks up, Bobbi is raising her eyebrows at him. 

“You still get your paycheck by mail?” she asks, light and teasing. She’s got a huge stack of files in her arms and her long hair is pulled up into a high ponytail at the back of her head. She’s got hints of dark circles under her eyes, probably exhausted from the long nights this job often requires especially when prepping for a mission, and Clint doesn’t miss that part of field work but he’s still bored of his temporary desk assignment, filing everyone else’s paperwork. “You know they have direct deposit for a reason.” 

Clint reaches for the coffee as he flips through his bills. “I like getting mail,” he says, and hopes that she doesn’t ask why because he isn’t sure there’s a good way of explaining how comforting it is to get mail like a real person. 

Bobbi snorts and walks off to her own desk to set down her files. 

Clint drops down into his seat and flips idly through his mail, paging aimlessly through a magazine after setting his bills and paycheck aside. As he leans back in his seat, a card drops out of the magazine. Clint goes to toss it in the trash can by his desk, thinking it’s one of those ads to subscribe to yet more magazines, but then he takes a second glance at it and realizes it’s a postcard. Clint frowns. Everyone he knows or cares about is in town, and no one sends postcards these days anyways. 

On the front of the postcard is a picturesque beach scene, a striking blue ocean bordering a white sand beach, a couple palm trees that have likely been photoshopped in peaking in the edge of the card. Cheery, generic font reads _Cancun_ across the top of the photo, and when he flips it over, there’s no return address written. In fact, there’s nothing written on it at all, not even his own address. 

“Who’s in Cancun?” Bobbi calls across the room at him. “And don’t you have work to do?” 

“It’s nothing,” Clint calls back, waving her off. “It’s just an ad, probably.”

Bobbi narrows her eyes at him like she doesn’t believe him, and she’s always been sharper than people have given her credit for, but she just sighs and turns back to her work. Clint feels a twinge of guilt and can’t figure out why, because it wasn’t like he lied, but he’s not sure he’s told the full truth either, because after so many months, Clint has grown quite familiar with the feeling in the pit of his stomach that can really only mean one thing. 

He squints at the postcard, knowing without knowing how or why that a clue will be there for him. After a few minutes of searching, he finds it. There, in the upper right corner, right in the corner of the little square indicating where to place the stamp, is a small red hourglass, so small that at a glance it would almost look like a careless smudge of ink. But there’s something deliberate in it, the placement of it, the drawing of it. Clint lets out a long breath and stares at the postcard until his vision blurs. 

It’s an invitation.

\---

Even after Clint finishes his required regiment of physical therapy and psychological testing to make sure he’s still mentally sound in the face of a near-death experience (though near-death is stretching the truth a bit, Clint thinks), even after passing with flying colors and getting cleared for active duty again, Clint finds himself sitting his behind his desk day after day, filing the same paperwork he’s been filing for weeks. And when he asks about it, no one gives him a straight answer. He makes it about a week before he gives up on trying to do anything about it, because no one will budge, and he decides to cash in some of his many unused vacation days and treats himself to a trip. 

It’s probably a horrible idea, but Clint has always liked warm places and it’s been forever and a day since he last took a vacation, so when he replies to the invite the only way he knows how – shoving the postcard back in his mailbox where he found it with something like _how do I know that I can trust you_ scrawled across it – and it disappears a few days later and then a few days after that, a plane ticket shows up in his mailbox (a challenge, he thinks, or a promise), he only thinks about it for a week before he books his own flight and packs his bags. 

Cancun is balmy and pleasant when he arrives and he’s lucky enough to not hit any rainy days in his first few days there. He checks into a nice hotel that isn’t packed with tourists in the strip that juts out into the ocean and spends his first few days just lounging around on the beach, soaking up the sun and letting the stress and weariness from his life drain out of him. He ventures into town once or twice each day to pick up fresh fruit and food from local shops and restaurants because he hates hotel food on principle and spends the rest of his time with his toes in the sand, drinking beer and all kinds of fruity cocktails because he’s on vacation and it's not like he ever spends money in a real way anyways. He deserves this, he figures. 

Days pass and Clint begins to wonder if he misinterpreted all of the little hints and signals he’s gotten from the Black Widow, wonders if this is in reality some kind of trap, wonders if she was just bluffing. And he can’t figure out why it bothers him so much, that she might not show or that she might show on less than friendly terms. Because he’s on vacation in a beautiful place and he’s eating good food and anyway the Black Widow did basically try to kill him last time they saw each other, so he really shouldn’t be sitting around hoping for her to show up instead of just enjoying a well-deserved vacation. But it does bother him, a little niggling feeling at the back of his head like there’s something he’s missing, the way he can’t quite put his finger on what’s going on. He supposes that whatever he tries to tell himself, there are some parts of the job that he was made to do – puzzling things out is one of them.

Clint sips on a cold beer as he lounges in a beach chair in his swim trunks on the fringes of the hotel’s beachside property where it’s less crowded and wonders if he should just head home about a week after arriving. After all, the Widow has proved in the past that she’s very good at figuring things out, and especially about him – his name, his address, his history. If she really was inviting him to come to meet her, wouldn’t she have found him by now? And just as Clint thinks he’s maybe getting a little hungry and he should probably head in to get dressed and look for some food, a shadow falls over him like the entire universe knows that he’s just about to give up and is looking for a reason to stay.

Clint peeks up over his sunglasses and finds the Black Widow staring down at him. And for the first time, he sees her not in her combat suit, not armed to the teeth, not hidden beneath a ballroom gown and a wig and an entire persona that isn’t hers that might as well be battle armor in and of itself. Instead, she’s dressed like almost every other vacationer, a pair of big sunglasses slid up over her eyes, a wide-brimmed hat, her hair tied in a loose knot at the nape of her neck. She’s so much—and Clint, who has endured more than his fair share of pain and suffering at her hands knows this, but it’s one thing to know that with the hairs at the back of his neck standing on end and the threat of death chasing at his heels, and it’s a whole different thing to see her like this, looking so normal and ordinary, wearing a fashionable bikini and a casual, light sarong tied around her waist like she’s just here to soak up the sun like everyone else, like she doesn’t have an ulterior motive. She smiles then, and it’s almost jarring after the wild brittleness in her expression last he saw her in Kiev. Clint would almost feel cold, but she keeps smiling at him like she wasn’t a hair away from taking his life the last time they ran into each other. 

“I wasn’t sure you’d come,” she says, even and soft, barely audible over the sound of the waves lapping against the shore. Clint wonders if it’s the environment that’s making her suddenly seem so delicate. 

Clint shrugs and slides his sunglasses back up his nose. “Me neither,” he says. And then a moment later, probably a little more abrasive than he means, “What do you want?”

She doesn’t flinch and nods towards his beer. “A drink?” she asks, almost like it’s a joke, almost like they have enough of a relationship to joke. A beat, and then she pulls up a beach chair next to him and sits. “I’m not here to kill you, if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Clint pauses, his beer lifted halfway to his lips. “I wasn’t,” he says, “But thanks, I guess.” After a moment, he reaches into the small cooler sitting by his feet and fishes out another bottle to hand to her. 

She takes it from him with a slight grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. She pops the top off of it and takes a sip, leaning back in the chair next to him. There’s a brief moment of silence that hovers over them, and Clint is almost startled by how comfortable and familiar it all feels. 

“You look better than last time,” he says by way of making conversation, not knowing how to confront this odd feeling settling around them. 

She shrugs and gazes out over the water, and behind her sunglasses, Clint can see what appears to be the dark shadow of the remains of a black eye coloring her pale skin just above her cheekbone. He wonders if she got that on the job or elsewhere. 

She lets out a long breath. “Yes, well,” she says, and Clint thinks maybe he can hear that brittleness creeping back into her voice again, that careful sterility and distance. “That’s what happens when you haven’t just been hauled off to Siberia for a few weeks.”

Clint raises his eyebrows at her and lowers his hand bringing his drink to his mouth. “Shit,” he breathes out before he can remind himself not to say it out loud. He thinks about the hollowness around her eyes and cheeks last time, thinks about the flightiness in her stance like she was a caged animal. He wonders if it was his fault, if her bosses are getting suspicious of her just like his are of him, if the punishment preferred by the Russians isn’t something on the scale of suspension or expulsion but rather torture or death. 

She shrugs and takes a long sip of her beer. She stares wordlessly out at the blue horizon. She’s quiet for a long moment, and Clint feels something tighten in his chest and wonders if she’ll ever speak to him again. 

“Should you even be here?” Clint asks suddenly, feeling an inexplicable rush of concern at the tip of his tongue. “If they found out you were here—”

“I’m not a prisoner, you know,” she says sharply, suddenly harsh and defensive once more, suddenly like a wild animal provoked. “I’m not kept under lock and key.”

And Clint doesn’t know if he believes what she’s saying, doesn’t even know if _she_ believes what she’s saying, but he doesn’t know how to put any of the thoughts running through his head into words in a way that won’t send her into a frenzy. So he does the next best thing and changes the subject. 

“So you never told me – what do you want?” he asks. “Why are you here?”

The corner of her mouth twitches, just a touch, like she’s considering letting herself be soft again, and she asks, vaguely, “Same reason you are, I suppose.”

“Really,” Clint says flatly. “Your bosses no longer trust you and benched you so you took a vacation out of spite too?”

A startled laugh escapes her mouth, and she turns to look at him from behind the corner of her sunglasses, and Clint could swear that behind the glare from the sun and her dark shades, he spies something like concern or maybe guilt. 

“Sorry,” she says and almost sounds like she means it. She falls into another momentary silence and picks at the label on her beer bottle. “I guess,” she says slowly, finally, like she’s measuring every word. She stops and tries again, “Do you ever feel like you’re not quite a real person?”

The strangeness of her question catches him off guard and if he were walking, he probably would’ve stumbled. There’s something hesitant and heavy in her voice, like she’s trying to say something she’s never tried to put into words before, and he doesn’t even know what any of it is supposed to mean, just that whatever it is she’s trying to say, it’s something she’s never quite been able to articulate before, something subtle, something important. Clint thinks about the sparse files he’s found on the Red Room – the records of brainwashing, of human experimentation, of atrocities that Clint has only just begun to piece together with the broken information he has. He thinks about it and thinks that he wouldn’t know what to say to her even if he could find his voice inside his throat. He wonders instead if that’s what she means or if it’s something newer, fresher. 

“I wake up some days feeling like I don’t know who I am,” she says softly, so quietly that if Clint didn’t know her to be one of the most deliberate people he knows, he would think that he’s maybe hearing things. “Like my whole life, all the many decades of it, has been a dream.”

Clint frowns, thinking maybe he knows something like that, except that it’s this, right now, that’s making him question what’s real and what isn’t. “Why am I here?” he asks. Maybe third time’s the charm.

She turns to look at him then, and through the semi-opaque lenses of her sunglasses, Clint thinks he can make out something bittersweet in her eyes. Her mouth turns up again, but it doesn’t feel like she’s smiling. 

“I guess I just like to know that I exist outside of my work sometimes,” she says, and moves to stand. She dusts some sand off her legs and tips her bottle at him. “Thanks for the drink.”

She makes as if to leave, and Clint feels something tug right under his skin. “That’s it?” he calls after her, not knowing why he feels he needs to get in another word edgewise, just that he does. “You brought me all this way just to say that? You could’ve just called.”

She pauses and turns around to face him again, quiet, and Clint wonders if she always has this much stillness in her life and wonders what it would be like to live with so much silence. 

“I’m sorry,” she says finally, her words oddly halting a little like it’s hard for her to say, like she was hoping she could get away with not saying all of it, “About your arm. And about trying to kill you. I was… acting out of fear, I suppose.” She smiles a little, but it doesn’t look entirely genuine, and adds, “I’m guessing my bosses are a bit tougher than yours when you fuck up.” She pauses then and twists her mouth, like she can’t believe the words coming out of her mouth, “I’m not saying this so you’ll forgive me—I didn’t really want to say any of it because I’m not looking for any of that. I don’t need it and it’s not why I invited you here. I just—I wanted to see you again and give you the opportunity to ask me to fuck off for good. Closure, I guess.”

Clint feels the breath rush out of him as he lets her words sink in. It makes sense, he supposes, and it’s not like the rational part of him particularly wants to forgive and forget entirely, but he there’s a part of him that can’t make peace with this being the last time he’ll see her. 

“I wouldn’t have come if I didn’t want to see you anymore,” he says finally, and it sounds the most like the truth out of anything he could’ve said. 

Something shifts in her posture then and Clint thinks he can see it again, the unexpected softness in her, just hidden behind the layers and layers of roughness that she’s had to accumulate, perhaps by force. She stops, looks at him like she’s never truly looked at him before, and ducks her chin to cover up what looks like is trying to be a smile. 

“You can call me Natasha, by the way,” she says. She shrugs and looks out over the water, almost like it’s hard for her to say. “It seems only fair, I suppose.”

Clint sits back in his seat. _Natasha_ , he thinks, and wonders if that’s any realer than anything she’s been around him. 

“Is this a truce?” he asks, not really hopeful but needing to hear it anyways. 

“No,” she says.

It’s not as upsetting as Clint’s bosses might want him to think. “Then I’ll see you again?” he asks.

Natasha smiles for real then, some thing small and soft but spreading a certain warmth over her features anyways. “I expect so,” she says.

She has a way of speaking that makes everything she says sound like a promise, and Clint has learned to take everything she says with a grain of salt. But this, at least, is the truth by virtue of the field they work in, and somehow, it’s one of the most reassuring things Clint has heard all day.


	5. 22.9068° S, 43.1729° W

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear I get slower and slower at posting chapters every time... I'm so sorry! and I also apologize that this may feel like a lot of the same (or at least it does to me), but this all is going somewhere I promise!! things will be changing up soon and there are some exciting things to come
> 
> thank you, whoever you are, for sticking around if you're still reading this, and comments and kudos are so, so very much appreciated!

Sometime after Clint runs off to Cancun and comes trudging back, the dust finally settles around him and Clint gets sent out on field missions again – little things like low profile security details or information drops, but it’s a start and after months of being chained to a desk and he’ll take what he can get, and it feels good to be challenged again, however little this may be. It takes a little while, like they’re easing him back into it, like they’re taking baby steps trying to make sure they can trust him with the real stuff, but eventually, Clint gets assigned to a higher priority job again. 

Clint gets sent to Rio de Janeiro with a SHIELD security detail to bring in a man who’s been evading arrest in a case SHIELD has been building against an international arms trafficking ring. It’s mostly just Clint being sent in, with ample backup close behind just in case of course, because his mark is known to be heavily guarded and easily spooked. The plan is to have Clint slip in disguised as a staff member at the hotel his mark is staying at – which Clint grumbles and complains at, because whose idea is it for him, collectively voted least likely to own a suit, to keep working undercover missions that require him to get all prettied up? – and Clint will slip into the mark’s room to extract him when he orders one of his standing meals with room service. It’s boring, but it’s tried and true and there’s something to that, at the end of the day. 

It’s a chilly day when Clint arrives in Rio, almost unseasonably so, though it doesn’t help as Clint makes his way through the hotel his mark is staying at. The collar of his shirt, buttoned up to the throat, still chafes at his neck and the tie still feels too tight as he pushes a little trolley down the hallway of the twenty-fifth floor where his mark is staying. Just a handful more minutes of this, Clint thinks, hoping that his guy won’t put up too much of a fight and make this more awful than it needs to be for the both of them. 

All of Clint’s hopes for a quiet night come screeching to a halt when Clint turns the corner to the stretch of hallway that leads to his mark’s room and he sees that the door stands slightly ajar. Clint heaves a sigh and shoves the trolley aside, reaching for the gun taped to the underside of the trolley that SHIELD made him bring to be more discreet. The weight of it in his hand is heavier than he likes, but orders are orders and he gets, however begrudgingly, that carrying his customary bow with him would kind of blow his cover as hotel staff. 

He nudges the door open with his foot, gun at the ready, and almost trips over the prone body of what looks to be his mark’s bodyguard, bashed over the head and firmly knocked out. A breeze kicks at the side of his face as he steps into the room, and Clint jerks his head up to scan over the room, his heart suddenly in slamming in his chest though his hands don’t shake. His eyes land on his mark, who’s tied to a chair with thick rope – ankles and wrists bound just so – and even if he didn’t stumble into the room to find her picking through his mark’s pockets, he’d recognize that handiwork immediately as the same ties that she surprised him with in Singapore, all those months ago. 

“Natasha, what the hell,” Clint says, the words coming out sharp and biting from the surprise and disbelief of finding her in the middle of yet another one of his missions because it’s starting to feel a little like she’s got it out for him, like she’s trying to sabotage him despite whatever goodwill she wants him to believe she has for him.

Natasha looks up but doesn’t stop frisking the man’s pockets. She smirks, pulling some loose change and a pack of gum out of his pocket and tossing it aside. Her long hair is pulled back into a tight, efficient ponytail that swishes between her shoulder blades as she straightens up, a hand on her hip and the other resting on the back of the chair, casual like they’re in one of their living rooms, greeting each other after a long day, like they’re normal people with normal lives. But there’s an unconscious man who’s been beaten within an inch of his life tied to the chair she’s leaning against, and there’s the palpable weight of the gun in Clint’s hand, and he feels heavy and off balance. 

“Good to see you, Clint,” she says, easy, easy, always easy. “Started to think I might not run into you again.”

Clint shifts his grip on his gun, finding his palms suddenly sweaty despite the cool breeze coming in from the open window. “What are you doing here?” he demands, sounding perhaps sharper than he means, but it feels almost cruel to run into her thwarting yet another of his missions when this is his first time out since his last breach of trust with SHIELD.

She shrugs. “Same as you, I suppose,” she says, and it throws Clint back suddenly to Cancun, to the softness in the way she approached him, sat with him, offered him her name like a precious gift. He’s struck by the contrast between the person she is now – all business and clipped words, efficient and deadly and coiled tight like a spring – and the woman he met on the beach in Mexico – warm and gentle and almost vulnerable. He wonders which of these people is the real her, wonders how they can coexist in one body. He wonders if she even knows the answers to these questions.

Natasha smiles at him, and the razor edge of it is still sharp, but there’s something kinder to it, maybe, underneath the assassin’s front she puts on. “This man has connections to some very powerful people,” she says vaguely. “I imagine my bosses must be interested in him for that reason just as your bosses are.”

Careful not to let his hands shake, Clint keeps his gun trained on her, worried she’ll slip through his fingers again like she always does, worried she won’t. “What the hell did you do to my mark?” he asks, just short of snapping at her.

Natasha almost snorts, almost contemptuous, almost like she can’t believe what he’s saying. “We’re spies, Clint,” she says. “Surely you’re not under the illusion that this sort of thing is outside of our job description.”

And maybe it’s the glib tone in her voice, like this is all still just a game to her, never mind that both of them have suffered the consequences of bowing too early and too easily to each other. Or maybe it’s just that she’s here, again, rubbing it in his face, again, one step ahead of him, again, and he’s tired of always scrambling to pick up the pieces too late. But whatever it is, it pushes a sort of anger out of him that tastes sour on his tongue.

“Why the _fuck_ do you keep doing this to me?” he hisses at her. “You know I almost lost my job over you, right?” 

And maybe it’s the bite in his voice, because he’s tired, he’s so, so tired, or maybe it’s the gun he still has on her, despite the fact that some might consider them friends or at least friendly acquaintances, whatever that means in their line of work, but Natasha’s expression finally falters, just a fraction, just a twitch of her mouth, a slight tightening around her eyes. Clint almost feels a sort of bitter satisfaction at that, however much he feels bad about guilt tripping her like this. It’s all entirely inappropriate, probably, but nothing about their relationship has ever been particularly appropriate. 

Natasha shifts her weight to her other foot, crosses her arms across her chest, and frowns. “I’m just doing my job,” she says evenly, though an edge of defensiveness creeps into her voice despite, Clint’s sure, her best efforts, “Just like you. It’s not like our countries or agencies are friends.”

And it’s true, and Clint knows this, knows that going up against her means going up against the Russians, means going up against something bigger than just the two of them sidestepping each other in a hotel room, but it doesn’t take away the sting, doesn’t stop it from feeling smaller and more personal, somehow. 

“Why _my_ missions?” he asks and hates the way his voice sounds desperate and thin, hates the way it sounds like he’s taking it personally – which he is, not that he wants her to know. “Why _me_?”

Something soft enters Natasha’s expression then, the line between her brows smoothing out, and she uncrosses her arms. And suddenly, there it is, peeking through the cracks in her veneer, the gentle, vulnerable woman he met in Cancun, the one who was maybe as tired as he is of all this duplicity, the one with as many regrets and guilts as him weighing her down. 

“Maybe I just wanted to see you again,” she says quietly. There’s a beat, and then her weight shifts back on her heels like she’s peeling away from him again, the gaps in her mask closing up as she gets ready to leap back into the real world. “You look well, Clint. I’m glad.”

The honesty in her voice startles him, knocking him off balance, which Clint later blames for the fact that he misses her retreat by half a second. The words spill out of her mouth like a diversion and then she turns and runs, making to throw herself out the open window. What she’s planning to do after she jumps, Clint doesn’t know, and his heart leaps into his throat.

“No!” he shouts. “Stop!”

His finger squeezes the trigger on his gun, his spy’s instincts kicking in at last, in a desperate attempt to stop her, maybe, but the bullet clips the end of her ponytail as it trails down after her as she drops out of sight and nothing more. He runs over to the window after her, peering out, but she’s already out of sight, blending in somewhere in the flow of people below, the dangling line that she must’ve swung down on the only evidence of her trespassing. Clint curses under his breath and calls for backup, telling them to set up a perimeter to look for Natasha – not that he thinks they’ll actually find any trace of her – and asking them to send a couple of EMTs to check on his mark. He steps away from the window, holstering his gun, and scrubs a hand over his face, already agonizing over the fallout over this one. 

\---

When Clint touches down at SHIELD’s New York office for his mission debriefing, he’s immediately met and escorted to one of the grand offices on the top floor of the building reserved for SHIELD’s top brass, and the kernel of apprehension that’s set up shop in his stomach since he left Rio grows in to full-blown dread. As he’s led down various hallways, his anxiety grows when he recognizes the path to Nick Fury’s office, and Clint thinks that this time, he’s probably well and truly fucked. 

Nick Fury leans back in his seat when Clint walks in, elbows resting on the armrests of his chair and hands steepled in front of him. He eyes Clint carefully as he walks over and sits down in the chair across from Fury, fear lodged in his throat. Clint wants to say something like _I can explain_ or _this isn’t want it looks like_ , but he isn’t entirely sure that either of those statements are true anymore, so he sits and waits and hopes that the silence will start scaring him less.

“So,” Fury says, too casual, “I understand that you had another run-in with our friend” – he reaches to turn and look at the file on his desk, mostly for effect, Clint thinks – “Agent Romanoff.”

Clint sits ramrod straight in his chair, his back stiff and his hands folded in his lap, clutching his his hands so tightly that his knuckles begin to turn white. “Yes,” he says, thinking to himself – single word answers, don’t incriminate yourself, don’t get fired, because this job is all he has to make him a real person and there are parts of it that he really does enjoy, at the end of the day, despite all his complaining. 

Fury tilts his head at Clint, entirely unreadable. “You seem to have made a habit of running into her,” Fury says, and he’s just stating facts now, but he has a way of doing so that makes it sounds like Clint’s fault. “Seems to me like you’re either particularly unlucky or she’s taken a liking to you.”

A moment passes before it occurs to Clint that Fury is waiting for some sort of acknowledgement or explanation.

“I can’t speak for her, sir,” he says, just managing to keep his tone clipped and professional. 

“I see,” Fury says slowly, measuring out the words, and leans forward. “Would you care to clarify for me what happened in Rio?”

He pushes a button on his desk and Clint hears Natasha’s voice, crackly like it was recorded through the comms – _maybe I just wanted to see you again_. The sounds of it knocks the wind out of him, and he thinks, well, he probably should’ve figured they’d be listening more closely to the mission audio files after his unofficial suspension from field work. 

Clint clears his throat. “I did my job,” he asserts, because he did, the letter of it anyways. “I pressed her for information and when she fled, I attempted to subdue and pursue her.” There’s a beat, like Fury’s still waiting, and sometimes Clint hates how well the senior SHIELD agents use silence like a weapon. “Am I in trouble or something? Because look, I did everything I was supposed to. I have no control over what she says or does.”

Fury examines Clint closely and then lets out a breath. “Listen,” he says levelly, and Clint just knows he isn’t going to like what Fury has to say. “You’re one of my best agents, and I personally don’t believe you’re a double agent, but I also have to be realistic.”

Fury’s comment hits Clint low in the gut. _Who thinks that_ , he wants to demand, but Fury pushes on, and Clint supposes it’s probably not his place, anyways. 

“The facts are that your clearance rates have dropped since you first encountered her,” Fury says, “And people have begun to get suspicious. You understand that I can’t have that. I can’t have people saying my agents can’t get the job done, and more than that, I can’t have my agents doubting each other in the field. I say this so you understand that this isn’t personal. I have to run a tight ship.”

“So, what, I’m suspended again?” Clint asks, unable to keep the bite out of his voice, because tentative relationship with Natasha be damned, it feels unfair, because he’s not intentionally trying to sabotage SHIELD. He’s not a traitor. He’s not a double agent. Sure he’s fucked up a few times, but at his level of service, who hasn’t? 

Fury sits back in his seat and lets out a breath. Clint feels something clench in his gut, already knowing that whatever Fury’s about to say, he won’t like it one bit. 

“I’m temporarily reassigning you to DC,” Fury says after a lengthy pause. When Clint opens his mouth to protest, Fury lifts a calm hand to silence him and continues, “I want you to understand that this isn’t a demotion in any way. Just a reassignment. I can’t have you in the field and I’m trying to help you by not putting a suspension on your record. I’m sending you to SHIELD Academy to help oversee some of the training in Operations.”

Clint slouches and crosses his arms, frowning. “Babysitting?” he says deadpan, because he remembers being at the Academy still, remembers all the young recruits that SHIELD gets every year, dreaming of being spies and saving the world, remembers all the cocksure assholes he had to deal with when he was going through training. It’s considered a good position, Clint supposes, and many of the top agents take a rotation or two there sometimes if they want time off from the field, but school was never Clint’s cup of tea and Fury knows he’s been actively avoiding being assigned to the Academy since he graduated. 

“It’s either that or desk work,” Fury says, raising his hands in an _it’s not my problem anymore_ sort of gesture. 

Clint narrows his eyes at Fury for a moment and when Fury doesn’t budge (not that Clint expected him to), Clint sighs. “Fine,” he grumbles.

When Clint leaves the office that day to go home and pack up some things to move into his SHIELD-assigned apartment in DC for a while, Clint expects to be angry. He expects to be angry that he’s being shuffled around like everyone’s last pick on the playground, that he seems to be always just running out of luck, that he’s going to be stuck again in a job he doesn’t like wasting away until someone higher up decides he’s worth it again. But as Clint throws a couple sweatshirts into his bag and debates the merits of reorganizing his arrows before setting out the next day, he finds that the anger leaves him. Instead, Clint just finds himself thinking about the hotel room in Rio, about the softness around Natasha’s eyes, about her quiet voice cutting through the cool air ( _You look well, Clint. I’m glad._ ). He thinks about that and he thinks about Cancun and he thinks about winter in Budapest and wonders, years from now, which parts of this will feel real and which he’ll think of as just a bad dream.


End file.
